Own Your Day

by Keith Rosen

  The real problems begin when sales leaders start to believe in the illusion that they are masterful at multitasking and that it’s actually necessary to get the job done.

  Think about what multitasking might look like while engaging in a conversation with one of your direct reports. Let me set up the visual for you.

  It’s after lunch, and you’re walking down the hallway, heading back to your office. One of your salespeople grabs you and begins filling you in on a meeting he just had with prospect. It’s about a deal he’s been working on for the past several weeks. You walk together until you reach the door to your office. In the middle of asking your salesperson about an objection he mentioned struggling with, the desk on your phone begins to ring. You let it ring twice when you notice a text message from your boss on your mobile phone.

  What are you thinking at this point? Right now, right here, this situation becomes another one of your defining moments. Do you fall victim to actually believing you’re capable of handling these multiple tasks effectively at the same time? Do you hold up your finger and say to your direct report, “Sorry, just one second” while you grab the call? Or do you keep nodding and looking up periodically from your phone, trying to demonstrate to the salesperson at some level that you are engaged and listening while you simultaneously reply to the text you just received?

  Look at you! Making it all happen at once. You feel as if you’re getting all kinds of things done at the same time. You’re so productive! You must feel proud being a master multitasker to get multiple tasks done at the same time. Your direct report must be impressed as he observes you giving him your divided attention.

  Are You Building or Eroding Trust?

  Or is he? What is he really thinking at this point? “Gee, I guess what I’m doing isn’t as important to him as it is to me. Then why did he tell me to do this?” or “His call and text is more important than me.” Or worse: “I’m simply not his priority.”

  It can take months to build the trust needed for any relationship to be successful and only seconds to destroy it. But don’t give up hope. You can always rebuild trust by resetting the expectations in any relationship. I spend a whole chapter discussing “the art of enrollment” in my book Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, which is the language sales leaders use to set or reset expectations, while creating buy-in and alignment around shared goals.

  The law of reciprocity always starts with you. When you multitask while engaging in a conversation, task, or project with someone, especially someone on your team, you’re doing one of two things in every conversation: You’re either building trust, or you’re eroding it. You are either developing or supporting someone, or you’re not. Multitasking erodes trust every time. Period.

  Multitasking is evil. In addition to the collateral damage it creates within relationships, it rarely, if ever, works because you are not investing 100 percent of your time, focus, and energy into performing and engaging in each task, activity, or conversation the very best you can.

  Instead of trying to do multiple tasks at the same time and achieving only mediocrity with all of them, choose to do just one task or focus on one conversation at a time, and see that through to completion. This way, you can do it with precision and maximum output.

  Speaking of the conversations you have each day, keep in mind that self-management isn’t just a strategy but a language and way of communicating. If you’re resisting this idea, then you’ll appreciate chapter 20 regarding adrenaline and your relationship with it.

  Attempting to have a conversation with someone while checking e-mail or texting is like trying to play tennis, golf, and soccer simultaneously. You may feel a rush of excitement and adrenaline from doing so, but you won’t be playing any sport as masterfully as you could if you were focused on only one.

  What’s the point of time blocking if you’re going to do several things at once and not achieve the level of excellence you’re capable of? To take the sports analogy even further, the path to improvement and mastery comes from doing certain drills over and over again to the point of perfection—to the point of developing muscle memory so that you can execute your skills in the game flawlessly and with very little effort or thinking. And this becomes more automatic and natural for you through the process of ongoing practice and refinement.

  A good coach would never recommend that you work on several different drills at the same time. So why do we think it’s a good idea to attempt running multiple drills on the sales floor at the same time? Because of the illusion of productivity, often based on what you were taught by your manager. In reality, it doesn’t work. Committing to working on a single task at any time is crucial if you want to avoid errors and truly take back your day.

  Go Do: Practice Chat

  Take a moment right now to practice focusing on a single task. Find someone at home or at work whom you can visit with. The conversation can be work-related but doesn’t need to be. Feel free to talk about upcoming weekend plans, a sporting event, a certain project or customer, or something in the news. As you talk, avoid any impulses to check your phone or to engage in any activity other than the conversation at hand. See how long you can go—a minimum of ten minutes.

  Notice how focused the other person is during your conversation as well. This is when the law of reciprocity kicks into high gear. That is, if I give you the gift of focus, listening, interest, and attention and I respect your opinion, you in turn will reciprocate that for me. Now, imagine if you create the same type of atmosphere and relationship with each one of your direct reports, peers, and customers. This is what breakthroughs are made of.

  [PART THREE]

  EXTREME MYTH BUSTING

  CHAPTER 18

  Eliminate Your To-Do List

  Cut the Cord

  It’s time to kill your to-do list! That’s right! We’re getting extreme now. If that makes your skin crawl, how about this: It’s time to retire your to-do list. Does that make you feel better? Regardless of how you position it, the cord must be cut—the one thing that feeds you the tasks and activities that you’re supposed to be doing and focusing on each day.

  It’s time to abandon your to-do list and find a new home for those activities because the hard fact is, to-do lists don’t provide the kind of focus, structure, and accountability people think they do. In fact, they usually produce the opposite effect because often no deadline is associated with each task.

  Most of the time, our eternally growing and never-ending to-do lists just make us feel guilty about what we’re not getting done each day. So let’s get rid of them. I’m going to show you how, along with a much better way to own your day.

  Self-Accountability

  When discussing people’s daily or weekly schedules, they often use terms like routine, projects, appointments, tasks, and to-do lists interchangeably. Let’s start with distinguishing between recurring tasks and one-time tasks. An effective routine encompasses a series of important and prioritized activities that are scheduled, recurring, and consistently performed the same way.

  One-time tasks are nonrecurring, often difficult to plan or predict (a blown light bulb), and intermittent, and as such, difficult to embed into a routine (externalities).

  To illustrate the difference, we’ll use a sales leader who’s looking to develop an effective sales coaching initiative with his team to help develop all team members to reach their fullest potential, reduce attrition, and bring in more clients. As part of his to-do list, he may have listed “Listen to and observe the sales reps and the conversations they’re having with prospects when they are cold calling.”

  The challenge here is, this activity on his to-do list was never assigned a timeline or completion date, and it was never actually scheduled into his routine. As such, it often gets put aside or forgotten about and replaced with myriad other activities that do get scheduled into his calendar or that pulls him in different directions.

  Now imagine that instead of putting this activity on your to-do
list, you scheduled it as part of your weekly routine. For example, every morning between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m., when this manager’s team was making cold calls, he would begin his day by spending thirty minutes observing and listening to one of his sales reps making calls. He was taking the necessary time with that person to first set expectations and then explain to him in why this is a benefit to him. Once your reps are aligned with your intentions, only then can you debrief honestly and authentically around what you observed and how they can improve. Now, this critical activity that will uncover numerous coaching opportunities to schedule tasks as part of his daily activities, with specific timelines attached. When that happens, he’s much more likely to get it done.

  The key here is to be able to identify the activities you need to engage in on a consistent basis (daily, weekly, biweekly, even monthly) that support your goals, priorities, and lifestyle.

  Conversely, one-time tasks with a finite life span and no measurable degree of repetition or consistency are handled differently. Some examples of these kinds of tasks that are more difficult to plan for include replacing the cracked screen on your smartphone, updating software you use, rearranging your office, taking your car in for service, buying a new desk chair, planning your presentation for your yearly national sales meeting, and so on. The constant, however, is that even these activities need to be scheduled in your calendar or you risk not getting them done or not doing them in a timely fashion.

  Look at your routine as an automatic, habitual, and natural way of handling the important things in your life and at work that need to be taken care of on a consistent basis. It’s also going to help you handle the items that aren’t important but still need to get done. It doesn’t require the conscious discipline or thought that one-time tasks on your to-do list require simply because these things will eventually become automatic and scheduled as recurring appointments in your calendar. That will make it much easier to measure and manage.

  Your to-do list, on the other hand, is more of a tool to remind you of the additional tasks, appointments, projects, or externalities that need to be done that fall outside of your regularly scheduled activities. But in the spirit of abandoning your to-do list and simplifying your life, we’re still going to honor the methodology behind crafting a routine, and as mentioned, schedule these items into our calendars. After all, this does fall under the “Planned for the Unplanned” universal law I discuss in chapter 13.

  This alone is reason enough to build in the additional buffer time and plan for the unplanned. Remember, if done correctly, while you may have to shuffle a few time blocks or pieces of the puzzle that make up your routine, even these to-do items need to find a place in your calendar to get handled. As I mentioned, if it takes up time, then treat it as an appointment and schedule it.

  After you follow your newly created routine for about a month or two and find that it’s working for you, your to-do list will naturally diminish. That’s because you are already handling the priorities in your life and are automatically referring to your calendar to schedule these to-do items rather than writing them down on a separate, autonomous list with no due date, timeline for completion, or scheduled time(s) specifically devoted to completing them.

  Go Do: Mine Your To-Do List for Potential Recurring Activities for Your Calendar

  Scan your to-do list for the one-off tasks that need to be scheduled, and add them to your calendar.

  Then identify any other remaining tasks that could be recurring and build them into your routine.

  Don’t limit this exercise to work-related to-do items. Your routine becomes the powerful and truly transformational tool it’s capable of becoming only when it seamlessly integrates all of your most important work-related and personal tasks and priorities into each day (such as the nonnegotiables we discussed in chapter 8).

  [PART THREE]

  EXTREME MYTH BUSTING

  CHAPTER 19

  Stop Focusing on Results

  Let the Activity Be the Reward

  Realize that there’s always more to do! There’s always more that can be done at the office, in your home, or in your life. There’s always another call that can be made or another e-mail, text, or social-media post that you can respond to. The key is to recognize that it’s a process, so you can truly enjoy the journey. After all, what’s the point of eating a piece of chocolate cake—to get to the end or to savor every bite? How about the goal of exercising? To finish your workout or to maintain a level of health, vitality, and personal satisfaction while enjoying the process?

  The same holds true for your routine. Know when enough is enough each day so that you can recognize and celebrate your accomplishments on a daily basis (even the small ones) rather than waiting until “the end.”

  Have you ever been in this situation? “Yes! We hit our quarterly sales numbers and business objectives. Congratulations! High five!” And then what happens? Your reward? The counter resets to zero, and you do it all over again! The quintessential “three-calendar month” is driven by quarterly goals for the company.

  If you continue going through the process with your eyes solely focused on the finish line, you’ll miss out on the journey. Remember, achievement happens every day. Be careful not to hook yourself onto the future. Enjoy the process of reaching your goals.

  Paradox: The Result Is the Process

  What if you shifted most of your attention away from the result you want or need and onto the process instead? The how in the equation is more important than the what, or the goal. This is the champion’s way of executing the specific steps of the equation. How are you going to achieve your goals specifically, and what is the messaging and communication process going to sound like when you speak to and communicating with your prospects and customers?

  After all, you don’t do the result; you execute the process, which produces the result as a natural by-product of your efforts. That’s the paradox—by honoring the process, you can enjoy the benefit of knowing that you will attain your goals because it’s the process that will get you what you want.

  A Flawed Model for Success

  “Once I make my quota, hit my number, close that sale, get that promotion, help that customer, have more money, solve that problem, then I’ll be really happy and satisfied and will finally feel successful!”

  For how long?

  This is a flawed model of thinking because in this scenario, you’re allowing external situations and outcomes to dictate your internal condition, happiness, confidence, and peace of mind.

  The solution: Shift your thinking from focusing on what’s next to what’s now.

  Be realistic here. Your goals aren’t going anywhere. They’re set. So why do you feel the need to continually obsess over the results, let them dominate every conversation, and annoy your direct reports about their goals when interacting with them? They know what their goals and numbers are. Do they need to be reminded about them continually?

  Many managers harbor deep inside a limiting and toxic belief that tells them, “Focus on the results, and the results will happen faster.”

  Yeah, right.

  Why obsess over the results when it’s going to be what you do in the moment and how you do it that will ultimately produce your desired outcome and become your ultimate formula for success?

  Take the Result-Driven Challenge

  Would it make you feel better if we validated this right now? Let’s test this theory that plagues sales leaders all over the world. Okay, you’ll need to do a guided visualization exercise. Are you ready? Begin. (And remember to close your eyes when doing this exercise.)

  Think about your goals, commitments, business objectives, or sales targets. Can you envision them? Are they clear in your mind? Okay.

  Now, for the next thirty seconds, that’s all I want you to think about. Imagine all of your goals in your mind’s eye, and focus on nothing else. Ready? Go!

  (Thirty seconds later.)

  So what happened? Did the result manifest an
y faster? Are you now closer to achieving your goals?

  I don’t think so. My point is that continually focusing on the result doesn’t help you achieve the results you seek. Paradoxically, focusing on the result becomes the very detriment to achieving your goals because you are no longer focused on the process, the communication, the how, the quality of output, your valued customers, or ultimately your own people and peers.

  Of course, it is absolutely essential to plan for your future, set goals, and have a clear vision for yourself, your team, and for your organization. However, this needs to be balanced with being in the moment and choosing to live and act with purpose.

  Engagement Starts at Home

  If you are a leader, that role doesn’t stop or start at work or at home. It’s who you are. That’s probably why I’m so overly conscientious about what I’m modeling for my children every day.

  As the proud father of three honor-roll students, the topic of homework, what they learn at school, and its relevance to the “real world” have a tendency to surface every once in a while.

  Sometimes they ask me, “Dad, explain to me how this homework is even relevant to what I’ll be doing in the future when I get a job or start my own business. I mean, when will I ever need to use this in the real world?”

  My response is simply this: “If it’s part of your curriculum and what you need to do and learn to get the grades you want and go to the college you want, then it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter how seemingly insignificant it is or how many times you’ve done that task. Regardless of what it is, if you are going to put forth your personal effort, then focus one hundred percent of your energy and effort on what you’re doing in that moment.